 How many people decided that maintaining their own site may not be for them? It's kind of hard sometimes. You've got to keep up with it. You've got to be on top of it. You can do it though. You've just got to keep on top of it. And just a note, I will be available the rest of the day. I'll be here and available for questions and stuff during lunch and all that. So if you have any other questions, I got some good questions during the break. So thank you. I was asked what I'm actually using for my little guy in the corner here, my image, my video. I'm actually recording this whole thing. It's called useloom.com. And if we go to it, oh, I just stopped it. But if we go to it, this is the entire first half here, first part, I guess. And it's saving it, and that will be available on my website too. This is the first part, so I'm going to close that. I'm going to show you how to start it up. So you can see it's called useloom.com. And it is a free recording software. It also has a desktop version, which is what I'm using right now. Start the recording. Okay, welcome to the second part of WordPress 101 at the Dayton Word Camp. So thank you for being here. We're going to go into some plugins now and finish off this segment of 101. We've got about an hour-ish left, maybe 45 minutes, and then we'll do some questions. So at the end, if you have any extra questions, we're going to talk about plugins. We talked about the site setup plugins that I use a little bit earlier. So there's that list. Again, it will be available on the site. But these plugins are for specific industries and for specific reasons. Now, you don't want to use every single plugin that I'm showing you. Then you get to where those guys are in the back at 81. And we don't want that for anybody. So here are some things you could use if you're trying to do e-commerce. Is anybody trying to do e-commerce? Oh my gosh. It's like the whole room. Let me ask a question of you guys. Have you ever run an e-commerce site before? Okay. Talk to that guy. All of you. Or me. And if you've ever run one before, raise your hand. And so people know who to talk to. Okay. Talk to the people that have their hands raised because it is more than you might think it is. Would you agree, you guys that have done it? It can be the biggest bear in your life and take over your life. There's so much support. There's so many things that can go wrong. I'm not trying to dissuade you. I'm trying to say like just get some expert advice. Talk to somebody who's done it because it may not be for you and that's okay. But if you really want to do it, you got to kind of know what you're in for. Okay. It's like having a kid. So I like some of these things for different reasons for e-commerce. Easy digital downloads. How many of you are going to do digital content? This is for you. Okay. So downloads, PDFs, video, audio, stuff like that. WooCommerce. That's for any, pretty much any kind of e-commerce that you would want to do. Shipping and all that jazz. Restricted content. That's for like membership sites. You can restrict areas of your site so that only gold level can see this or, you know, and they can only see part of that page. But then platinum level can see the whole page plus this other page. It's just for them. I like to use, when I did membership sites, I liked to use member mouse. Has anybody heard of that one? It's really good. It is paid. The reason I liked it was because they were really responsive with their support and it's a very easy to understand platform. I feel like sometimes WooCommerce can get a little complicated, but it's very easy to understand. And then seamless donations. How many of you are running any kind of donations, nonprofits, that kind of stuff? Churches, those kind of things. Ministries. Seamless donations is awesome. It is so freaking simple and it's done. You don't have to worry about all that junk. Like you set up with Stripe or PayPal. I'm pretty sure those both are in there. And you just have donations. It's done. So it's very, very easy if you're just doing donations. It's really great. What was it? I don't know. There actually is, I have a client on Patreon and they actually, there's a WooCommerce plugin for that, I believe. So I would use that specifically. And sometimes if you go to the Patreon documentation and you look up how it connected to WordPress, sometimes they'll have a specific plugin they recommend and I would use that. If you're using a specific type of system that's not PayPal or Stripe or just regular credit cards that go to a bank account, I would go to the company's website like Converge or Patreon or somebody, whatever company they're using for donations. And I would look up what their documentation is, type in the word WordPress and see if anything comes up with, hey, use this plugin or we like this plugin best. Yes. WooCommerce versus Shopify. Is that your question too? Okay, great. You were laughing so I figured it was. It's going to get me kicked out of WordPress. I know it's going to get me kicked out of WordPress. All right. The question is WooCommerce or Shopify. Are you a developer? Okay. If you have the passion and the drive and the time to really get into WordPress on a developer level, I feel like WooCommerce is amazing because it's so customizable and there's so many things you can do with it. If you're like, I just want to sell pretty things. If that's kind of like the mentality, I just want to sell my stuff and be done with it and do my other things like run my classes or teach my things or do my videos or whatever it is. Just sell stuff and then do something else too. It's not your only deal. The customization is less important. Does that make sense? You want to have a nice site but you don't need to have special FedEx shipping that ships two packages. You want to be like the next Amazon or Etsy or whatever. That's not the point. You want to just sell stuff and do your other stuff. Then I would say go with something else. If you want to be more involved and you want it to be more complex, I had a woman who had a company that she sold medical device covers for people who had colostomy stuff. That's very specific, but she would have like 100 different fabrics. You could add gems and bows and stuff like that to make it more fun for kids and stuff. It's not the funnest topic in the world, but she needed some really complicated shop stuff. Wordpress was the only option. It's so many. It was the only one we could use because it was so customizable. She needed people to help her do it because she wasn't a developer. She just wanted to do her thing and sell her stuff. She hired people like me and another developer to work on it together and make it work. It was pain, but we made it work because it was so custom. If that's the direction you're heading or you want to do membership and stuff like that, that's the direction you're heading. Wordpress is good because even WooCommerce does membership subscriptions and stuff like that. Wordpress is good because you can have a lot of services and those kind of things, but if you just want to sell and not really worry about it and do some other stuff, then Shopify may be a better option. But you really have to go into the brand and the lifestyle of the business. I'm a branding expert, so that's kind of where I take it because I want to see the holistic side, not just which is better, Wordpress or Shopify, but what's better for you as an individual? Are you going to run this yourself? Are you going to hire a team? Are you going to have a support customer service group and what happens with it? What happens with returns? What happens with shipments that don't get there? How do you take stuff to the post office? Are you doing all the postages of stamps.com? I could go on with those questions. There's a lot of stuff that goes into e-commerce. That's why I was like, you guys, you need to talk to somebody. You can get to those questions and get some of those things out before you really just pick one piece. I would kind of maybe explore it a little further if you haven't or talk to somebody here that had raised their hand so that you can kind of get past some of that and then you'll be able to have a clear and go, oh yes, clearly I need to use this or this. And you'll have a really clear definition of it. Does that make sense? Yes. So free stuff, uh-huh. Right. I like easy digital downloads just because you can use it without using a payment method. If you're doing a download for like an opt-in, how many people have an opt-in for their email list? Like, you give me your email and I'll give you this PDF, right? Or this thing, this video. I like to actually do that through the email marketing system. So I use Mail or Light and I use that through the email marketing system. So they put their email in, it says thank you, check your inbox, the email that comes to them has a link and that link takes them to the PDF directly. So no one can get to that PDF unless they have exactly that link, which is kind of rare. And it's free anyway, so if somebody finds it randomly and not worried about it, like a code or something, because if somebody goes to a cart, you have to put in a code. Unless you have paid stuff too, like it's a paid thing and you're like, hey, I'm giving you this for free, it's worth $25, then they're happy to put in the code. They want that thing, right? They don't want to pay the $25. But if it's just a $0 amount thing and they're putting in a code to get it, you know, or whatever, they have to put in, because sometimes they'll even force a credit card sometimes if there's even a free amount. I mean, it's very tricky with that. So I try to use things that are a little more alternative, but there's no payment, it's just a link, a button. You can do it that way. Other questions about e-commerce? Yes. Not too hard questions, easy questions. I like that a lot. I've also done Etsy integrated sites with WordPress. People that really are just crafty and they're like, hey, I've already got an Etsy shop, but I want my own site to showcase stuff that I've done or do custom stuff. Then I have them leave their stuff on Etsy, they're familiar with it already. And there's a couple of plugins once called Etsy360 that you can use and actually just put your stuff in Etsy and do what he like what he said with big commerce. Import it in, done. That's it, you're done with it. And all the payments happen on the other platform and all the inventory happens on the other platform just like what he said. So you're really using two pieces, but one that's like he said a little more easy, like a little easier than trying to deal with WordPress but big commerce, you've got that ease of, if I have a Shopify, big commerce that you're using and you're get used to. Yes, donations with additional information. Yeah, seamless donations will do that. You can add whatever field you want it to capture and you can do that that way. There's PayPal donation plugins, there's Stripe donation plugins, like other ones other than just seamless. Seamless is an actual specific plugin, but you can actually add your own fields and capture whatever information you want. You can make up, sometimes I'll even do it where I'll do a ninja form first. It'll say make a donation. It'll take them to a ninja form and then instead of saying submit on the ninja form, it'll actually take them to a second page where they do seamless donations. So I've already captured their information and then they just pay through seamless and it's done. So it's like using two pieces, but for the consumer it looks like one seamless, they just go from the form to the pay and then they're done. So I'm going to do that too. A little more fancy, but it works. Okay. Plug-in tools. How many of you are doing events? You're going to need an event calendar? Okay. The events calendar by Modern Tribe is one of my favorites. It's my favorite. It's really, really good. They have a lot of updates they do and it's just got a lot of great options. Oh, just dropped my mic. Hold on. It's just failing. Okay. Instagram feed. There's actually an Instagram feed plugin in the repository just called Instagram feed and I really like that as well because it just adds an element of kind of updated content to your site without you having to go in there and update content. So your current Instagram feed, you can put it wherever you want pretty much with a little short code. I like MailerLite, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Emma, all those. I like MailerLite the best. You get the most for your money, I feel like, with them. I've done a lot of research on different products and they're the one that has the best value for money and they have their own plugin. So if you're using an email marketing system, you want to look and see if they have a plugin for WordPress and use that plugin. Just find whatever email marketing system you're going to use. Find their plugin and just use their plugin. It will be much easier. There's no code involved. If you're going to be doing Google Analytics or if you want to do that in the future, I use the Monster Insights plugin. That's the easiest one I've found to use. Google Analytics you need to set up on a Google account and then they'll give you a nice little U code. It's what's called a U code. There's a couple of different numbers strung together and you'll download Google Analytics, drop that number in, and then they'll both kind of connect up that way. There's a couple other steps, but that's the gist of it. Yes, you have a question? Yes, yeah. I would really consider looking at Mailer Lite if you're using one already because their payments are lower than a lot of the other ones because once you get to a certain point that you have to pay. The other thing is sometimes they restrict access to certain things like automation, which is what I talked about with opt-ins. The automation of someone signs up, they get put in X list, then a trigger happens, like an automation happens. With MailChimp, they actually restrict that to only paid users in some cases with certain things you can do with it. I like that Mailer Lite doesn't do that. You can use it on the free version. They also give you heat maps and all kinds of stuff. Look at the one you're using and do some comparisons so that you have the most pieces. Like I said, you want to use fewer plugins, right? So instead of using something like MailChimp and then maybe you have to use another plugin to help you with automation or something, maybe another platform would help with that if you're using those kind of things. So just trying to make sure you get the most you can in the least amount of items that you're trying to either use or pay for. Because I don't think you should pay for things you don't have to pay for. Does anybody else have a question? Hi Online, which is a job board and simple job board. If you're doing any kind of recruiting or anything like that or you have the people who want to have a hiring or career section on their site, you can use these. They're free. They're really good. They're in the repository. If you're going to do any podcasting, Blueberry is on here. And then also Coast Schedules. Anybody heard of Coast Schedule? Awesome. So Coast Schedule is a calendar for your WordPress. And you might think, WordPress lets me schedule posts if I want to. So if we go into posts here and we look at this one, I could schedule this for any time I want, right? Let's say I put it in August and I say, okay, and I have it scheduled. When I go to look at it in posts, this is what I get. A list. I get a list. I don't get anything else. What Coast Schedule does is it gives you a grid calendar. It shows it to me on an actual square grid calendar, which is what, for me, is much easier to kind of like view, especially when you have like 50 or 60 or 70 or 100 posts and you're scheduling them out for a year or whatever it is, six months, you can actually go through and see where your posts are listed. Then what else Coast Schedule does is it says, hey, this is a great post. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, that's it, that's it, that's it, right? And it will then put those links in your grid calendar because you might actually want to post something in April and then have it post again to social media in August. It lets you do all of that right in Coast Schedule. It's awesome. So if you're going to do blogging, it's definitely the way to go. I also use Social Pilot, which is a third-party app that keeps it contained in WordPress. It's a great plugin, very light, but it does a really good job. Posting to multiple pages or groups on Facebook with one, yes, you can, I believe you can do that with Coast Schedule. All right, tools, I have some tools here. Now some of these get a little more complicated but I'm going to explain them as I go. So duplicate page I mentioned before, duplicate posts, I'm sorry, I mentioned duplicate posts before, you can create a really cool page for each of your people that work at your company or whatever. I really want to reuse this because the bio is in the right place, the photo is in the right place. You can use duplicate page as a plugin and you can just put that in and duplicate your pages so that you don't have to redo each of those pages every time. Now, remember I mentioned builders and I mentioned Divi? With Divi, you don't need duplicate post because you kind of start eliminating some of those plugins, right? I keep hitting this. That's where you start eliminating some plugins. So also when you have plugins in your section there, you can turn them off if you're not using them. Then you just turn them off. They're called deactivate, they're still sitting in there but you just deactivate them. I'll show you, for example, we'll get duplicate page in here. Here's duplicate page and we'll do duplicate post. So you can see them both. Okay, let's go into plugins. Here they are. They're not activated. I can activate duplicate post. Activate duplicate page. Use them. Okay, now I'm done. I can just deactivate one or both and it doesn't have to run. It's just sitting in there. It's just sitting there waiting for me to start it up and use it. Site origin builder. Now, when I used blue shake themes, when I used to use those exclusively, I used the Site Origin Builder on top of them. Now with Gutenberg, it may not be as needed but if Gutenberg is not your favorite or you play with it a little bit and you're just kind of like, it doesn't make sense to me, sometimes that happens. These developers, they build these things and they're like, this is awesome, it makes total sense and then I get in there and I'm like, what? This does not make sense at all. Example, Hootsuite and Social Pilot. Hootsuite, I don't understand. It's another type of builder that's kind of mirroring modules and columns and putting things in blocks. You basically say, I want some text here and I have three columns. I want some text on this side and I want a picture on this side and in the middle I want another picture that's an arrow that points to the picture or points to the text or whatever you want to put there. Or you can have three columns of text and you have a picture on top of each one like your services or something. You can have multiple with it than just having, here's your text box like it does in WordPress. Now, like I said, they've got Gutenberg and you've got a lot more options but Site Origin Builder is another one that you can try out and play with but it's a plug-in. It goes on top of your theme and I found it really useful and helpful so you can try it out and see if it works for you. Easy Modal. Modal, does anybody know what that is? Modal. You could say, hey do you want to save 10% or whatever? Those are like the e-mail marketing ones, right? Where you put your e-mail in and you say, okay I'll save 10% These are like, hey, you should contact us you click it and it pops up a whole contact box. Now you have to be careful with these because remember we're designing for mobile, right? So you have to be careful with them but you can use them in certain cases. You can also have them pop up to show like a tool tip tip, maybe a definition of something. So I've used those in those cases before. So you eliminate some of that text on your page and put it in a little like pop-up box instead. Jetpack is another plug-in that typically comes with WordPress, but you have to activate it. Let me show it to you. It does require you to have a WordPress.com account to utilize it. But there are some really cool things that I like that it does. Let's do some screenshots here. So it has a few things that it does. It does some more analytics stuff that's more like on the site, not necessarily Google Analytics, but like within the site it gives you some analytics. It does some stuff through WordPress.com. If you have a blog and you want it to kind of be posted out with all the other blogs, it kind of helps with that. It does some stuff with images and video. They're just a little like little tweaks that it will give you that WordPress doesn't have inherently. And it's really nice. So if you want to look through that list, if you install the plug-in it'll say, here's all the things you can do. You can turn them on or off. It gives you carousel images, just little little tweaky things that I think are cool. Sometimes I use it in websites and sometimes I don't. It really depends on the client and what kind of content I'm doing. It can be a little heavy, so use it sparingly. Messenger chat is actually, how many people have a Facebook page for their business or the company they're trying to work with? Okay, it's a Messenger chat. So what this does is it allows you to, someone to message you using Messenger on your website. So it puts a little blue Messenger circle in the corner. Just like almost like chat with us live kind of thing. And it will actually message you through Facebook. So it's pretty cool. Opening hours, I like this plug-in as well. It's great for if you have some of these hours that change a lot or maybe they're expanding or they're downsizing or they're growing or whatever it may be, then you can have them, allow them to change their hours a lot. But it's always updated on the website. And you can put it in multiple places and only change it one time. So you're not having to go to the home page and change it in the footer and change it in the contact page and change it. You just put it in once. And if you change it once on that section within the plug-in, it changes it on all the other sections of your site for you. Maybe you've changed your domain or you've changed a page like maybe your page is about dash us. And now it's just about right forward slash about. And you want it to redirect. So somebody has tagged and favorited about dash us. When they go back to that page, it's going to say 404 error. We don't find this page. We don't know what you're talking about because the page is gone. So what you can do is use redirection. And it'll say about dash us is now just forward slash about. And it will redirect them. So anything that they've tagged as a favorite in their website and their browsers, it'll actually redirect them to the correct page. Sometimes I've gone in and cleaned up sites for people. There's a lot of pages they don't need. So I'll just make a list of all the slugs and I'll redirect them to the services page. Like they'll have a ton of pages that are just so extra. And I'll just take all those slugs, put a little document together. And then when I'm done, I go into redirection and start adding them in and say this random weird page goes to services now. So if somebody had favored it for some reason, it'll just take them to the services pages is where they should be in the first place or whatever whichever page it needs to be. If you want to get fancy with stuff and you need to know an idea of a page, sometimes this happens with galleries. If you're making galleries with photos, you might need to know the idea of a photo because word press assigns a number to everything. A reveal IDs is a plugin that I use occasionally to show me the idea of something. If you run across a plugin that says we need the idea of this page, it's not shown anywhere, but this plugin will show you what that ID is. And then WP file manager. Sometimes the media library can be a little bit kind of squirrely and not as user friendly as it should be or could be. And so the file manager just gives you a little bit different view of all the files you've uploaded and some of the files that are in your site. So you can go in there and see it in a little different view. Like I said, sometimes things work for your brain and sometimes they don't. So this is just another way of viewing it. Now I did have a question during the break that I wanted to address, and it was the difference between, oh wait, do we have a question? No, you would use the plugin, install the plugin, and it would show you the files in a different way, just in a different view, essentially. No, it's connected to the site inherent, like inside the site. The question I had was about PHP and CSS. So two totally different languages. And I'm going to tell you another story. So get comfy. Hope you like stories guys. When I was 13, I went to the library, very similar to this one in Ohio. And I told my mom, I said, I want to go to this class. And she's like, fine, I'll take you. It was at night. And it was an HTML 101 class. I was the youngest person there. Everyone else was in their 30s, 40s, had briefcases, scowls on their faces. It was, you know, seven o'clock at night, they hadn't had dinner. They were like, gotta be here for work. And they were struggling. And I was over there like, I loved it. I thought it was the best thing in the world. So we get ready to leave. And it was like a two and a half hour class. It was long. We get ready to leave. And I wait by the table, you know, the librarians, they put out all the books, right? And they're like, okay, check out the books on HTML. This is 1998, 1999. And I'm standing there like, Oh, man, these books look so awesome. And all the adults are just, they just leave. They're gone. They need to be dinner. And I just take all the books and I do this. I put them all in my bag. And I took them all home and I read every single one. And from then on, I couldn't, I couldn't let my mother, you know, get on me about not knowing a language, because I did, just not once she could speak. And I, I loved it. I mean, it was like learning another language. And to this day, I can sit down with an open notepad, you know, word, you know, like a word document, not word document, but like, you know, like a notepad document notes. And just a text editor and just type away and make you something halfway decent. Wordpress has really helped. You don't have to do that anymore. But learning that language was so eye opening for me. And to this day, I use it almost every single day in website design. And if we talk about PHP and CSS, it's just two other languages that WordPress uses. And HTML is pretty much the basis of a lot of the web. As far as like being the foundation, I guess, and it's used a lot. But PHP really allows the web to be more flexible and integrated and plugged in, I guess, to other pieces of the web, whereas HTML, it was a little harder to kind of shove everything into this little more archaic language. And then CSS is just another piece of that. And I call it the pretty language, because it really does a lot of things to make things look beautiful. It's the colors, it's the fonts, it's the imagery sizing, it's how your sites look responsive. And when you're on a phone, you don't see this photo or you don't see this video, you see this photo instead. So the site loads quicker and all that little stuff that just happens, you don't even know it as a consumer, all those languages. But learning HTML as a child, and being in that world from, you know, from being a teenager until now, I can say 18 years later, it's still just as fun, it's still just as exciting. And if you ever get a chance to go to a class like a library class, or you can audit college classes, you can go to these, you know, local colleges and just say, hey, I'm going to audit the CSS class or I'm going to audit the PHP class, do it. Because, you know, I'm not a language person, I don't, I mean, I learned French as a kid, on poteet, that's it, I can't even ask to go to the bathroom. And I don't remember any of it. But HTML, it's in there forever. So if you get a chance, and you're not sure exactly what to do with them or how to use them, look up local classes, look up, you know, local areas, but it's really the foundation. Those three languages are really a lot of the foundation of the web. And WordPress relies heavily on them. And so as you go through, you will see things like iframes, which is HTML, and you'll see things that are, you know, the CSS that we talked about in the Customizer, there's additional CSS. And when you go to, they say, Oh, I'm going to do this with this button. They're going to say, put this in your site and put this in your site, copy this code. And if you don't know how to read it and at least understand it a little bit, it can be really frustrating. And so getting just a little bit of knowledge can really go a long way for you to be able to look at something and go, I kind of understand it. I couldn't write it, but I can kind of grasp what's happening. You had a question. Yeah, you go to the administration office and you tell them you want to audit a class. And sometimes it's like 50 bucks or something real small amounts. I don't know how much it is here, but you can go to local colleges, community colleges, and look at their audit programs. Sometimes even have like free programming for adults during the day. You know, if you're over a certain age or sometimes they have a programming at night for like community education. And a lot of times it's the same professors and the same people that are doing adjunct. They'll teach those classes as well to make some extra money. So and it's just a couple, you know, it's not usually a lot. And this you can even, like I said, just audit a college class in some cases too. Yeah. Do you have a question? Linda? Yeah, Linda's the online and online class version. Yeah, that's that's a good one too. Yeah, I like I like the in person stuff because you know, I like people. That's why I like this. Do you have a question? Yes. What is it? I can't remember. Next session. He's going to do it. I know, right? What was the other questions? I saw a bunch of hands. Wimpidmap. He's going to go into a month, which I think right? You're going to go into him? Okay. So he'll tell you all about that. I do the simple stuff. I'm not kidding. He's going to go into that though. Any other questions? I had saw some hands. Okay. Um, so yeah, so is that cover those things? Everybody have the other questions about that stuff or any other WordPress related stuff? No? Oh my gosh, you guys just know everything. It's awesome. Yes. So you have a customized theme from a vendor you don't use anymore. And you want to kind of start new. I would probably say go with a staging site so you don't mess up your current site. So go and we'll go into the hosting, set up a staging if we can rebuild on that, change the theme out, do whatever the heck you want because it's not live. And then once that's ready, push that live. That's how I would probably approach it. Okay, guys, well, I have loved talking to you. I'm going to let you go a little bit early so we can talk so we cannot talk individually and talk to each other because we're here for the community part too, right? I love networking. I can't help it. So if you want to talk to me or anyone else, e-commerce people, raise your hand. The ones that need it, the ones that already know it, e-commerce, know it really well. Okay, you see us right now. There's like four of us. Talk to those people, five of us. Talk to those people. If you have e-commerce questions. And like I said, if you talk to all five of us and we all give you a different answer, go with your gut. Right? Always go with your gut because it's always going to be right. All right, thank you guys so much. My name is Elizabeth Pamplone and I will see you soon.